Man, this is great news. For years I've been waiting to see some Rutan effort in space exploration.
Bottom line: If anyone can do it, Burt can. Not only is he a true visionary in aviation, but he has a habit of surrounding himself with like-minded and equally brilliant people. (Max Faget, for one).
Just take a look at his success record. There are a lot of cool ideas realised.
Fundamentally, it's not a problem of the majority of gamers being geeky teenage boys. You could have a majority of gamers being well balanced, thoughtful sorts who are tired of misogyny and brainlessness in games, and we'd be in the same situation. Why? Because well-adjusted people have something other than games to balance their life, and so they'll buy a fraction as many games as hardcore nerds with no other life.
Hmm. That's somewhat opaque. What I mean is that it's selling to a market of sales figures, not a market of players. You only need a small fraction of "hardcore" gamers who thrive on blood, guts, and T&A to be buying 75% of the games, which will drive out a HUGE fraction of the buying public.
And let's be honest--it's easier to throw some jiggly cleavage and 'real life blood splatters' into a game than it is to come up with a convincing and immersive world. Easy, guaranteed sales vs. difficult, small sales and a rewarding game. Not many publishing houses are going to support the latter.
As an aside, there are two EXCELLENT games which have important female characters, although not the main character. One is System Shock 2! Blood and guts, first person shooter, with a few women scattered throughout, and...Shodan.
The other is Grim Fandango. Just about as wonderful (and funny!) as an adventure can get, and several women are pivotal to the whole game.
First of all, my FW1 comment was misinterpreted, possibly my own fault there. All I meant was that the FW1 GUI is a LONG ways from a 'zero learning curve.' The first while I spent with it after playing with small Linux-based firewalls was utterly shocking--this was a BIG product, and no GUI would make it straightforward on first glance.
Regardless, what you say makes sense--but I still have to ask why you're you are getting asked (and presumably paid) to do network administration on a product you don't know. MOST of the time (certainly not all, but most) that I've seen something like that happen, it's because an admin oversold themself to a customer or employee, and then had to scramble to catch up.
Heh. Yes, I know. I was being doubly facetious Firstly, Redhat isn't (technically, and possibly in other ways) Unix. Secondly, aliasing rm to 'rm -i' for sysadmin accounts has long been generally accepted as a Bad Thing! It drives me NUTS to see RedHat (and others) setting up root aliases out of the box. It's Wrong, Bad, and Dangerous.
I don't know of any admins I respect who allow root to have rm, cp, or mv aliased. None.
But that's just my curmudgeonly old-fashioned opinion.:-)
OK, what I meant by saying that he STOLE service is this:
Jaywalking, anal sex, putting an old engine in your newer car, and other such crimes are victimless crimes. You haven't done anything which directly hurts anyone else.
Theft, assault, vandalism, murder, etc. are crimes against a victim. They hurt someone directly. In some cases, that 'someone' is a company, but it's still damage as a direct result of the action of the perpetrator.
As for the politician comment, I'm not in the US but I have NEVER voted for a convicted felon.
The excuse of it being a 'mindset' is getting old. It was also part of the same mindset to pass around copies of commercial games on cassette tapes. Maybe I was just overly self-righteous, but in 1982, when I got my first modem, stealing phone service and copying games both struck me as illegal and wrong.
Furthermore, let's forget about the past. It happened, whatever has been done is done. Mitnick STILL doesn't seem to recognise that he ever did anything wrong, or give the slightest bit of confidence that he won't do it again.
"Having a separate crappy interface for every app or service, while better than none at all, is not a lot better."
NOOOOOOOOO!!!
Regardless of your opinion of good GUIs vs. CLI, a bad GUI is MUCH worse than a CLI. Command Line is likely a more obtuse but more direct path into the bit you want to administer. If you put a bad GUI on it, then you're just BEGGING to mess things up.
This brings up a second point: "if you aren't intimately familiar with every aspect of a system you shouldn't be touching it." Go ahead, call me arrogant--if you are an ADMINISTRATOR, then you absolutely MUST understand it. In those rare cases where you have to fix something ASAP that you don't know well, then a GUI is a handy set of training wheels--use them as sparingly as possible, and get rid of them as quickly as possible.
If you understand the product, then use the GUI or the command line or whatever makes you feel happy. If not, get studying.
"With the graphical tool your learning curve is reduced to near zero and you are immediately productive."
This is a tempting but flawed idea. Your learning curve for changing the product is reduced to near zero (which, mind you, depends heavily on the complexity of the program--ever seen the FW1 GUI?:-). Your learning curve for the product itself hasn't changed one bit. If anything, the fact that you can change it around might _extend_ the ramp-up time for actually leraning the product well, and that's not good.
Fundamentally, GUIs are different for the user than they are for the admin. As an admin, you are required to know the product you are dealing with, because the consequences of not doing your job correctly can mess up other people. Users are free to mess themselves up by using any product (with user privileges) they want, without understanding it.
I don't object to GUIs, but I don't view them as a clear-cut Good Thing. They have their place for admins, but make sure you know what you're doing with them.
I'm disturbed but not particularly shocked at the number of people missing the point here.
Mitnick is a convicted criminal. Mitnick is a THIEF. Regardless of how heavily the law came down on him, you can't get around the fact that he actually stole money (in the form of services) from companies. Furthermore, he seems to show no remorse, no guilt, no understanding that what he did was wrong, and no sign of reform.
I've been playing with computers since the beginning of the 1980s, and can't argue that times were very different. However, that does NOT excuse theft, and anyone (especially convicted thieves) who say it does are not the people I trust.
I was around then too. I, however, wasn't a thief.
"I pride myself on my honesty and don't steal, rob, rape, pillage or murder."
Um, yes you DO! You stole from companies. Furthermore, you STILL don't see it as wrong. You have the same attitude as Mitnick, and that's what the prosecutor was getting at. Lack of remorse, lack of true understanding that YOU ARE A THIEF.
You didn't just break some random law--you STOLE service! Others had to pay for you to do things that you were supposed to pay for.
I wouldn't hire either of you if my company's future depended on it. I don't need to lower myself to consort with unrepentant criminals.
The US government has been at the forefront of wiretaps for decades. They've pushed hard to get international wiretaps made easier. Now with the Patriot (hah!) act, they have the legal right to monitor ANYTHING that enters their country with fairly minor suspicion.
I'm not pointing any fingers. I asked if HE felt any responsibility. I'm curious to see his take on things.
Furthermore, let's not forget--HE broke the laws, and did some things that weren't exactly technically illegal because nobody had imagined that such things could be done before that. Skip ahead to present day, and we have a raft of bad law--possibly (POSSIBLY) because of his actions.
First of all, I should qualify that 'blips on the radar screen' comment. What I meant was that they were the FIRST blips on the radar screen. In other words, "General, I've got something here I think you should see."
The connection between phone service 'in the day' vs. IP addressing in terms of anonymity is a compelling one, but what are we seeing now? A big (BIG) push to localise people by IP addresses. It's a great bit of technology, but it does serve to tear the veil of anonymity. Would this have happened if we hadn't seen what anonymous hackers could do, on the phone lines?
As for the DMCA, I realise it's a bit removed from phone phreaking, but not THAT far. More to the point, it's being used as a tool to prevent developing technology that could be used for hacking (and piracy, and enforced privacy...), and that could well be a fear of hackers forcing the issue a while back.
Ultimately though, it's a very debatable point. I asked it not because I necessarily blame him, but because I'm curious about what his take on the fallout is.
Let's put it in the most basic terms: Would we be at roughly the same legislative state today without him? Why or why not?
And I see some interesting discussion on my point which pretty much is the point--to get people (including him, if possible) to think about how we got into this mess, so we can start to steer our way out of it.
In your day, phreakers et al were pretty much barely a blip on the radar screen. A few of you got charged with old laws, several were threatened or intimidated, and many many kids followed in your wake.
No difference between the Dems and the GOP? I disagree.
Please realise that I'm neither an American citizen nor a resident (although I was a few years back). This is an outsider's point of view.
However, I feel that there's a fundamental difference between the two. It may not be a difference in intent, but the two parties have different entrenched power, which means different practical goals. Consider that the republicans have been running the "Thinktank for a new American century" since well before Bush jr. was even nominated. That thinktank defines the goals of the US government, and pictures the US as an absolutely authoritative "peacekeeper" of the world, forcing American values on all countries that don't comply, with as much force as possible.
Now from what I've seen, the democrats have neither the coffers, the non-electoral power, the highly developed back-room infrastructure, or the gall to afford this brand of megalomania, so they have historically tried to get along with the voters and the international community more often.
Or in other words; while both parties are after the same goals and policies, the Democrats aren't able to implement them through brute force, violence, intimidation, and ruthlessness. The Republicans are.
OK, let's get something clear here. This guy has NOT been charged, threatened, or implicated in anything illegal. There seems to be no actual legal advice involved, just the fearful interpretation of a college student whose major is NOT law.
Is this a bad law? Yes. Should it be struck down? Absolutely. Is this guy (and others) in trouble? Quite possibly.
But there's a big difference between people reacting to (perceived) bad law, and people actually getting arrested, charged, tried, and convicted by that bad law. Work at striking down the law--don't spend time making a martyr of someone who isn't dead yet.
Does anyone know where this bizarre name-changing ideology comes from?
The first Harry Potter book was the Philosopher's stone everywhere except the US, where it was the Sorcerer's stone. Phoenix, a mythical bird that consumed itself with fire, has been replaced with...firebird. Minotaur, a half man/half bull has been replaced with...thunderbird???
Seems like most of these name changes involve a dumbing down of the name. There are other examples around too. The question then, is WHY???
Here's something that might get you pointed in the right direction. Go check out comp.netscape.public.mozilla.unix (groups.google.com for the archives), and look up the articles by Jim Dunn. He moved heaven and earth to make mozilla binaries that work under HP-UX, and his 'stuff' carried over to Solaris quite nicely. VERY useful, and will probably get you up and running.
The way things are looking right now, I don't see Russia (or any other country) going along with the US on exploration, financing things, co-development of anything, or trade agreements.
The US as a nation is working VERY hard to be the biggest bully in the schoolyard. They're bombing countries at will (Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria next, and then probably Iran. Who after that?), they're violating international accords (the Geneva convention) and agreements (the Nuclear Non-proliferation agreement), they're violating the trade agreements they pushed hard for (NAFTA), and then they have the gall to turn around and accuse everyone else of doing the same.
The rest of the world--ALL of the rest of the world--is looking at the US with suspicion, mistrust, and fear right now. If a republican replaces Bush (I can't imagine him getting in again), then in five years the US is going to find itself completely isolated in the world.
"Our noble and beloved US military has begun the process of liberating the poor downtrodden martians from their fascist oppressors. Casualties are in the tens of thousands, but they're only poor third-planet non-Americans who don't even speak english, so they don't really count."
Or in this case, anti-sensationalistic which amounts to the same thing.
How many people will be dead by the time this virus is a year old? If we don't jump on it now, how many people will die annually from it five years from now?
How many people catch Malaria by sitting in the same room as someone else with Malaria?
Drawing stats on this (six month old) disease and comparing it to something that's established in the population and is transmitted by a completely different (and known) vector is the ultimate non sequitor. There's no connect. There's no line to draw. It's bullshit.
AMD saves this from being anti-competitive behaviour. They have a competing and compatible chip line which uses different pinouts. That not only provides competition, but provides proof of VIA's (theoretical) ability to compete.
So no, it's not. It may not be great, but it's allowed under competition laws.
Hmm. What you say is true. There has to be a line drawn somewhere, beyond which you give up on the user being unable to RTFM. However in the case of mplayer, the developer is a spoiled four year old brat as well. Here's a direct quote:
"Unfortunately MPlayer is out of our control. It's used by lamers, Linux users who can't even use Windows, and never tried to compile a kernel."
Call that tech support? 'If you can't compile a kernel, you're not WORTHY of our player.'
I've not had any problems with mplayer--it works for me. However, the developer is an obnoxious jerk who seems to spend more time belittling users than he actually would spend helping them.
Luddite? I think that's a bit extreme, given how much Bill has helped _advance_ technology. Also it should be kept in mind that the article I pointed to was written as counterpoint to a fairly glowing article about the bright and shiny future by Ray Kurzweil. Bill isn't quite as reactionary as the article indicates.
Regardless, I don't agree with many of the things that Bill worries about. As you say, the djinn is already out of the bottle on some issues, and as new avenues of technology and researc are discovered, those respective djinns WILL be let out of the bottle. There are some areas I'd be happy to see research not progress in (or at least not quickly), but as soon as you ban it, someone will set up a tiny offshore independent state with a research lab and a mad scientist. In short, everything that CAN be discovered eventually WILL be discovered. There's no way to avoid it, and I think that's the biggest weakness of the article.
At any rate (whew!), it was an article that gets people thinking, and definitely is relevant to the question of technology and ethics. If you agree or disagree with his points, he provokes discussion and debate, which is a Good Thing.
And as an aside, are you sure about the US being the only nation on earth capable of destroying the planet? Russia currently has ALL of the former USSR's nuclear armament now, and I'm not sure they're actively destroying as many as was planned. At any rate, I'm not sure that Bush and his cronies are bright enough to not push that shiny red button.
Slashdot Mirror
Man, this is great news. For years I've been waiting to see some Rutan effort in space exploration.
Bottom line: If anyone can do it, Burt can. Not only is he a true visionary in aviation, but he has a habit of surrounding himself with like-minded and equally brilliant people. (Max Faget, for one).
Just take a look at his success record. There are a lot of cool ideas realised.
Two good points you made:
If they've served their debt to society, and they appear to have truly reformed, then hiring them is expedient and possibly noble.
However, Mitnick is an unrepentant repeat offender. I wouldn't let him pay me to look at my computers.
Fundamentally, it's not a problem of the majority of gamers being geeky teenage boys. You could have a majority of gamers being well balanced, thoughtful sorts who are tired of misogyny and brainlessness in games, and we'd be in the same situation. Why? Because well-adjusted people have something other than games to balance their life, and so they'll buy a fraction as many games as hardcore nerds with no other life.
Hmm. That's somewhat opaque. What I mean is that it's selling to a market of sales figures, not a market of players. You only need a small fraction of "hardcore" gamers who thrive on blood, guts, and T&A to be buying 75% of the games, which will drive out a HUGE fraction of the buying public.
And let's be honest--it's easier to throw some jiggly cleavage and 'real life blood splatters' into a game than it is to come up with a convincing and immersive world. Easy, guaranteed sales vs. difficult, small sales and a rewarding game. Not many publishing houses are going to support the latter.
As an aside, there are two EXCELLENT games which have important female characters, although not the main character. One is System Shock 2! Blood and guts, first person shooter, with a few women scattered throughout, and...Shodan.
The other is Grim Fandango. Just about as wonderful (and funny!) as an adventure can get, and several women are pivotal to the whole game.
First of all, my FW1 comment was misinterpreted, possibly my own fault there. All I meant was that the FW1 GUI is a LONG ways from a 'zero learning curve.' The first while I spent with it after playing with small Linux-based firewalls was utterly shocking--this was a BIG product, and no GUI would make it straightforward on first glance.
Regardless, what you say makes sense--but I still have to ask why you're you are getting asked (and presumably paid) to do network administration on a product you don't know. MOST of the time (certainly not all, but most) that I've seen something like that happen, it's because an admin oversold themself to a customer or employee, and then had to scramble to catch up.
Heh. Yes, I know. I was being doubly facetious Firstly, Redhat isn't (technically, and possibly in other ways) Unix. Secondly, aliasing rm to 'rm -i' for sysadmin accounts has long been generally accepted as a Bad Thing! It drives me NUTS to see RedHat (and others) setting up root aliases out of the box. It's Wrong, Bad, and Dangerous.
:-)
I don't know of any admins I respect who allow root to have rm, cp, or mv aliased. None.
But that's just my curmudgeonly old-fashioned opinion.
OK, what I meant by saying that he STOLE service is this:
Jaywalking, anal sex, putting an old engine in your newer car, and other such crimes are victimless crimes. You haven't done anything which directly hurts anyone else.
Theft, assault, vandalism, murder, etc. are crimes against a victim. They hurt someone directly. In some cases, that 'someone' is a company, but it's still damage as a direct result of the action of the perpetrator.
As for the politician comment, I'm not in the US but I have NEVER voted for a convicted felon.
The excuse of it being a 'mindset' is getting old. It was also part of the same mindset to pass around copies of commercial games on cassette tapes. Maybe I was just overly self-righteous, but in 1982, when I got my first modem, stealing phone service and copying games both struck me as illegal and wrong.
Furthermore, let's forget about the past. It happened, whatever has been done is done. Mitnick STILL doesn't seem to recognise that he ever did anything wrong, or give the slightest bit of confidence that he won't do it again.
Hmm. I disagree on a few points.
:-). Your learning curve for the product itself hasn't changed one bit. If anything, the fact that you can change it around might _extend_ the ramp-up time for actually leraning the product well, and that's not good.
"Having a separate crappy interface for every app or service, while better than none at all, is not a lot better."
NOOOOOOOOO!!!
Regardless of your opinion of good GUIs vs. CLI, a bad GUI is MUCH worse than a CLI. Command Line is likely a more obtuse but more direct path into the bit you want to administer. If you put a bad GUI on it, then you're just BEGGING to mess things up.
This brings up a second point: "if you aren't intimately familiar with every aspect of a system you shouldn't be touching it." Go ahead, call me arrogant--if you are an ADMINISTRATOR, then you absolutely MUST understand it. In those rare cases where you have to fix something ASAP that you don't know well, then a GUI is a handy set of training wheels--use them as sparingly as possible, and get rid of them as quickly as possible.
If you understand the product, then use the GUI or the command line or whatever makes you feel happy. If not, get studying.
"With the graphical tool your learning curve is reduced to near zero and you are immediately productive."
This is a tempting but flawed idea. Your learning curve for changing the product is reduced to near zero (which, mind you, depends heavily on the complexity of the program--ever seen the FW1 GUI?
Fundamentally, GUIs are different for the user than they are for the admin. As an admin, you are required to know the product you are dealing with, because the consequences of not doing your job correctly can mess up other people. Users are free to mess themselves up by using any product (with user privileges) they want, without understanding it.
I don't object to GUIs, but I don't view them as a clear-cut Good Thing. They have their place for admins, but make sure you know what you're doing with them.
Unalias? To unalias something, you have to alias it first. I've never seen a Unix with rm, cp, or mv aliased out of the box.
If you need to alias these commands, you're probably typing too fast and thinking too little.
I'm disturbed but not particularly shocked at the number of people missing the point here.
Mitnick is a convicted criminal.
Mitnick is a THIEF. Regardless of how heavily the law came down on him, you can't get around the fact that he actually stole money (in the form of services) from companies.
Furthermore, he seems to show no remorse, no guilt, no understanding that what he did was wrong, and no sign of reform.
I've been playing with computers since the beginning of the 1980s, and can't argue that times were very different. However, that does NOT excuse theft, and anyone (especially convicted thieves) who say it does are not the people I trust.
Bah.
I was around then too. I, however, wasn't a thief.
"I pride myself on my honesty and don't steal, rob, rape, pillage or murder."
Um, yes you DO! You stole from companies. Furthermore, you STILL don't see it as wrong. You have the same attitude as Mitnick, and that's what the prosecutor was getting at. Lack of remorse, lack of true understanding that YOU ARE A THIEF.
You didn't just break some random law--you STOLE service! Others had to pay for you to do things that you were supposed to pay for.
I wouldn't hire either of you if my company's future depended on it. I don't need to lower myself to consort with unrepentant criminals.
In a word, yep.
The US government has been at the forefront of wiretaps for decades. They've pushed hard to get international wiretaps made easier. Now with the Patriot (hah!) act, they have the legal right to monitor ANYTHING that enters their country with fairly minor suspicion.
So yes they are, and they already have been.
Um...did you have a point?
I'm not pointing any fingers. I asked if HE felt any responsibility. I'm curious to see his take on things.
Furthermore, let's not forget--HE broke the laws, and did some things that weren't exactly technically illegal because nobody had imagined that such things could be done before that. Skip ahead to present day, and we have a raft of bad law--possibly (POSSIBLY) because of his actions.
(yes, I read your follow up post as well)
First of all, I should qualify that 'blips on the radar screen' comment. What I meant was that they were the FIRST blips on the radar screen. In other words, "General, I've got something here I think you should see."
The connection between phone service 'in the day' vs. IP addressing in terms of anonymity is a compelling one, but what are we seeing now? A big (BIG) push to localise people by IP addresses. It's a great bit of technology, but it does serve to tear the veil of anonymity. Would this have happened if we hadn't seen what anonymous hackers could do, on the phone lines?
As for the DMCA, I realise it's a bit removed from phone phreaking, but not THAT far. More to the point, it's being used as a tool to prevent developing technology that could be used for hacking (and piracy, and enforced privacy...), and that could well be a fear of hackers forcing the issue a while back.
Ultimately though, it's a very debatable point. I asked it not because I necessarily blame him, but because I'm curious about what his take on the fallout is.
Let's put it in the most basic terms: Would we be at roughly the same legislative state today without him? Why or why not?
And I see some interesting discussion on my point which pretty much is the point--to get people (including him, if possible) to think about how we got into this mess, so we can start to steer our way out of it.
In your day, phreakers et al were pretty much barely a blip on the radar screen. A few of you got charged with old laws, several were threatened or intimidated, and many many kids followed in your wake.
Now we're watching a world get built where PhD thesis material might be illegal, writing code can get you arrested and charged, and even giving an academic presentation is threatened.
How much responsibility, if any, do you think the early phreakers and hackers have for this rash of paranoid law?
So in the US, is it being released as "Harry Potter and the Order of the Firebird?" :-)
No difference between the Dems and the GOP? I disagree.
Please realise that I'm neither an American citizen nor a resident (although I was a few years back). This is an outsider's point of view.
However, I feel that there's a fundamental difference between the two. It may not be a difference in intent, but the two parties have different entrenched power, which means different practical goals. Consider that the republicans have been running the "Thinktank for a new American century" since well before Bush jr. was even nominated. That thinktank defines the goals of the US government, and pictures the US as an absolutely authoritative "peacekeeper" of the world, forcing American values on all countries that don't comply, with as much force as possible.
Now from what I've seen, the democrats have neither the coffers, the non-electoral power, the highly developed back-room infrastructure, or the gall to afford this brand of megalomania, so they have historically tried to get along with the voters and the international community more often.
Or in other words; while both parties are after the same goals and policies, the Democrats aren't able to implement them through brute force, violence, intimidation, and ruthlessness. The Republicans are.
OK, let's get something clear here. This guy has NOT been charged, threatened, or implicated in anything illegal. There seems to be no actual legal advice involved, just the fearful interpretation of a college student whose major is NOT law.
Is this a bad law? Yes.
Should it be struck down? Absolutely.
Is this guy (and others) in trouble? Quite possibly.
But there's a big difference between people reacting to (perceived) bad law, and people actually getting arrested, charged, tried, and convicted by that bad law. Work at striking down the law--don't spend time making a martyr of someone who isn't dead yet.
Does anyone know where this bizarre name-changing ideology comes from?
The first Harry Potter book was the Philosopher's stone everywhere except the US, where it was the Sorcerer's stone. Phoenix, a mythical bird that consumed itself with fire, has been replaced with...firebird. Minotaur, a half man/half bull has been replaced with...thunderbird???
Seems like most of these name changes involve a dumbing down of the name. There are other examples around too. The question then, is WHY???
Here's something that might get you pointed in the right direction. Go check out comp.netscape.public.mozilla.unix (groups.google.com for the archives), and look up the articles by Jim Dunn. He moved heaven and earth to make mozilla binaries that work under HP-UX, and his 'stuff' carried over to Solaris quite nicely. VERY useful, and will probably get you up and running.
The way things are looking right now, I don't see Russia (or any other country) going along with the US on exploration, financing things, co-development of anything, or trade agreements.
The US as a nation is working VERY hard to be the biggest bully in the schoolyard. They're bombing countries at will (Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria next, and then probably Iran. Who after that?), they're violating international accords (the Geneva convention) and agreements (the Nuclear Non-proliferation agreement), they're violating the trade agreements they pushed hard for (NAFTA), and then they have the gall to turn around and accuse everyone else of doing the same.
The rest of the world--ALL of the rest of the world--is looking at the US with suspicion, mistrust, and fear right now. If a republican replaces Bush (I can't imagine him getting in again), then in five years the US is going to find itself completely isolated in the world.
Sigh.
And on CNN:
"Our noble and beloved US military has begun the process of liberating the poor downtrodden martians from their fascist oppressors. Casualties are in the tens of thousands, but they're only poor third-planet non-Americans who don't even speak english, so they don't really count."
Or in this case, anti-sensationalistic which amounts to the same thing.
How many people will be dead by the time this virus is a year old? If we don't jump on it now, how many people will die annually from it five years from now?
How many people catch Malaria by sitting in the same room as someone else with Malaria?
Drawing stats on this (six month old) disease and comparing it to something that's established in the population and is transmitted by a completely different (and known) vector is the ultimate non sequitor. There's no connect. There's no line to draw. It's bullshit.
AMD saves this from being anti-competitive behaviour. They have a competing and compatible chip line which uses different pinouts. That not only provides competition, but provides proof of VIA's (theoretical) ability to compete.
So no, it's not. It may not be great, but it's allowed under competition laws.
Hmm. What you say is true. There has to be a line drawn somewhere, beyond which you give up on the user being unable to RTFM. However in the case of mplayer, the developer is a spoiled four year old brat as well. Here's a direct quote:
"Unfortunately MPlayer is out of our control. It's used by lamers, Linux users who can't even use Windows, and never tried to compile a kernel."
Call that tech support? 'If you can't compile a kernel, you're not WORTHY of our player.'
I've not had any problems with mplayer--it works for me. However, the developer is an obnoxious jerk who seems to spend more time belittling users than he actually would spend helping them.
Luddite? I think that's a bit extreme, given how much Bill has helped _advance_ technology. Also it should be kept in mind that the article I pointed to was written as counterpoint to a fairly glowing article about the bright and shiny future by Ray Kurzweil. Bill isn't quite as reactionary as the article indicates.
Regardless, I don't agree with many of the things that Bill worries about. As you say, the djinn is already out of the bottle on some issues, and as new avenues of technology and researc are discovered, those respective djinns WILL be let out of the bottle. There are some areas I'd be happy to see research not progress in (or at least not quickly), but as soon as you ban it, someone will set up a tiny offshore independent state with a research lab and a mad scientist. In short, everything that CAN be discovered eventually WILL be discovered. There's no way to avoid it, and I think that's the biggest weakness of the article.
At any rate (whew!), it was an article that gets people thinking, and definitely is relevant to the question of technology and ethics. If you agree or disagree with his points, he provokes discussion and debate, which is a Good Thing.
And as an aside, are you sure about the US being the only nation on earth capable of destroying the planet? Russia currently has ALL of the former USSR's nuclear armament now, and I'm not sure they're actively destroying as many as was planned. At any rate, I'm not sure that Bush and his cronies are bright enough to not push that shiny red button.